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(From the author) As a nonrepresentational painter I’ve often wanted to see if nonrepresentational poetry is possible. Inspired by experimental poetry I viewed last week which was only mildly intellectually stimulating (the concepts were not phenomenally gripping and the execution of some of the work, which simply sampled other text or in the worst case scenario was written in binary code 1010 00001 100001 1101, etc. left me wanting something more luscious and accessible). In my painting pieces work because they don’t break all the rules at once. Also, while they may not represent things or people they are not meaningless blather either. They are an attempt to communicate through a new language, one with logic, rules, purpose, but unfamiliar and still ripe with exotic possibilities. They are paintings which speak of things that overused concepts or simple relationships obfuscate and therefore require new forms. Beauty still shows up, the ecology of the work provides structure, and meaning paradoxically is still conveyed. In investigating nonrepresentational poetry I found I still wanted to retain elements of beauty, emphasize sounds, structure the relationship of words to one another while confusing a bit the concept of phrases, and give an overall impression of meaning that would be complex enough to experience but not summarize. Thank you all for engaging the work and providing feedback.

This is rich in imagery and vocabulary. My first concern is that I read all poetry out loud to give it voice, often picking up nuances that don’t come through the visual word. This is not a read out loud poem for me. I tripped and tripped because of the word choices. It is possible that the vocabulary is too rich and overpowers the message. It is also possible that I have clumsy pronunciation.

You may want to break this into stanzas so that the words have an opportunity to shine rather than being part of a mass of words.

Were the text color changes intentional? The lighter lines and words may be perceived as afterthoughts.

My crit is only suggestion. Please take what you want and toss the rest if you choose. If you rewrite and want me to take another look, please let me know.

I hope I was able to help. Thanks for the opportunity and for listening.

The text colors don’t show on my screen and it is broken into stanzas so I’m not sure what’s happening with that or how I can fix it. All the other experimental pieces I have recorded myself reading but I didn’t have time for that today. I’ll try to get that done and then I will experience the tripping and see how to change things. Thank you for your feedback.

hey there…not seeing stanzas on my end either but i got no colors to contend with…the imagery is wow…when i got to the end i needed to breath…wish i could see your stanza breaks as that would be my biggest crit…room to breath…

For me (an artist in love with color) this is just “delicious.” As Anna said, I think you’ve accomplished the feat of nonrepresentational poetry. I’m putting out a prompt on Monday and this poem would be so apt if you would like to join by adding the link to comments. Now I’m going to read it again for texture…my other favorite element of art. :0)

Thanks, sorry it wasn’t clear but I am Anna, I just didn’t want my explaination to color a readers initial perception so I put my justification in the comments section. I’d love to participate in the Monday prompt. I’ll do that now. Thank you for engaging the work!

First, let me start out by saying I have rarely met poetry that uses words with such precision and boldness as yours. I have a respectable traditional vocabulary, but I have yet to read one of your poems where I didn’t need to refer to a dictionary to really understand the message (here with anit-cavitational–I am blown away by the way you used it.). I say this not as a crit, but as praise. Words are central to idea–the more precise we can be, the more we can challenge the reading mind to think about what’s being said in detail, to me the more effective the poem in releasing something, some personal deeper understanding, in the reader. It may turn off some people, but it excites and involves me.

As far as critque, I’m lousy at it. I thought the experimental feel was strong here, the use of color associations creative and effective, but this is a poem that does not release it’s fragrance till it’s been passed more than once through the press of re-reading. If that’s what you were aiming for, you’ve been successful. I certainly enjoyed it, anyway.

First, thank you for understanding the impetus behind the language. The precision in language you speak of is of utmost importance to me, especially in the experimental work where I’m trying to reframe, or shift sideways, mental patterns that may allow us to finish lines in poetry or guess where the piece is going. The process is designed to ask the reader to really participate in the creation of meaning by the honing of their attention. I’m so happy you investigated anti-cavitation valve because these juxtapositions are designed to add potency. Also, the re-reading is part of my evaluation process for art. It’s effective if you can come back to it again and gain something new. For me, it is a gift that I want to give you, the reader, something to investigate, rethink, feel again, and engage again with fresh eyes. If I could convey these complex, sometimes paradoxical meanings in another way I would. I’m glad that makes things engaging for you.

As Gerhard Richter stated in response to his nonrepresentational painting, “Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. We denote this reality in negative terms: the unknown, the incomprehensible, the infinite. And for thousands of years we have been depicting it through surrogate images of heaven and hell, gods and devils.

In abstract painting we have found a better way of gaining access to the unvisualizable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the utmost visual immediacy – all the resources of art, in fact – in order to depict ‘nothing’. Accustomed to pictures in which we recognize something real, we rightly refuse to regard mere color (however multifarious) as the thing visualized. Instead we accept that we are seeing the unvisualizable: that which has never been seen before and is not visible. This is not some abstruse game but a matter of sheer necessity: the unknown simultaneously alarms us and fills us with hope, and so we accept the pictures as a possible way to make the inexplicable more explicable, or at all events more accessible.”

it doesn’t get much better than this. This is very good. I like ‘Naples yellow under French ultramarine hues
in drift chambers where saturation
blankets Antarctic glaciers sloughing into
anti-cavitation valves emoting indigo’

Anna, for me the poem is delicious in its imagery, and use of colour. I am also an artist by trade, so this poem spoke to me. I am absolutely terrible at giving critique, and do prefer to leave it to the people who know what they are talking about.

A fascinating experiment, Anna — Surely the sort of uncorsetting the aesthetic into a more fluid freedom is bold and dangerous – the way Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” caused a riot at its Paris premiere — certainly the bounds of tradition have to be defied, and to write a “nonrepresentational” poem is to paint without regard for natural contours, most of which are constructs anyway of what may perhaps be a former mind, one which cannot be grown from without defiance. Like Rilke said of Orpheus, “It is by overstepping that he obeys.” I loved the thick gobbets of color splashed helterskelterwise, suggesting a Hand which is passionately overstepping in order to cross Over. The difficulty always lies in leaving enough surface and reference so that the poem is not too much a solo journey — so that an audience can still connect with it. Nothing is creative that does not turn or trope from a base — the literature which all poems must spring from: so that balance of the dance is to whirl wildly, which you do, while leaving a skein of reference to help us follow through the labyrinth. I don’t mean this as critcism — this was an exhilirating read. The title “Dioxazine Eyes Scrying” lets us know that we’re in for a strange alchemical dive, but I wonder if something like “Dioxazine (The Purple Gaze of Persephone)” or something might say to the reader, “Here’s how you can follow.” Maybe that’s not necessary or at all what your aesthetic demands, but this reader would have felt more invited into what turned into a magnificent poem. Great work …

Thank you for your thoughtful commentary; I see your point. I did leave what I saw as the ‘follow’ by quoting from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116:

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

but that comes at the very end.

I like that you picked up on the purple as a connection to the sacred. This is ever the challenge with language because in painting while I still have people who experience pareidolia and see figures in the work, when none are present, it doesn’t happen often. However, language largely draws figurative pictures in our minds. My diction helps avoid associations that the reader comes to the work with by throwing in things they probably don’t encounter every day or have years of encrusted meaning around. I greatly appreciate your feedback and will give it some further thought. In the meantime I’ll try to avoid causing riots :).

Robert Anton Wilson

Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

Witold Gombrowicz

“Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog.” Ferdydurke

I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.

Gustav Flaubert

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Dušan “Charles” Simić

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Monique Wittig

"Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it... Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being - subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say 'I' I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor. "

W.S. Merwin

All the things that really matter to us are impossible...Writing poetry is impossible. I don't know how to write a poem. A poem - there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don't know. There is so much that comes out of what we don't know and what we don't have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. - from Doing the Impossible, Yes Magazine, Issue 59

Thomas Aquinas

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.